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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

Single engineers will pick clojure at companies , build a project in it, later that engineer will move on, now nobody can maintain this code so it’s rewritten in some normal language. I’ve seen that happen a few times. That code is hard to read and understand. This is why clojure will remain niche.

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You need a team that wants to use Clojure. I wrote Clojure professionally for 2 years, and everyone at the company was excited about it and sold on the language. Even after 3-5 years of programming in it. Now, at a different place, we write in a different language, and even though I still love Clojure, I'm not gonna write some project in it, even if Clojure might suit it so well, because I know these people are sold on different language, and I'm not going to preach and I'm not going to make their lives more difficult by having to maintain some obscure codebase.

That is possible with all languages. I've seen java, scala, clojure, perl, python, etc.

Usually this is made worse by bespoke build tools and optimizations that make the system punishing to pick up.

You've seen a case where someone wrote something in Python that later devs could not understand and then rewrote it in . . . what? And you've seen that with Java?

There's a big difference between a developer going off and writing something in one of the top five most used languages in the world and doing so in Scala.

Both are strange and alien to Javascript developers, who can be full stack.

Python may seem simple once you know it, but going in blind there's plenty of traps to bite you. Significant whitespace for one.

I think there's two different issues:

1. picking a language/tool that a company doesn't have personnel with experience using it

2. picking a language/tool that is esoteric, which generally implies #1 as well.

#1 on its own isn't great, but generally when sticking in the java/python/ruby/javascript/php/etc...mainstream languages, there's a lot more documentation, and there's a higher chance that _someone_ in the company will have some familiarity. If nothing else, it'd be easier to hire a replacement for.

A higher chance, yes, but it doesn't matter much; what is tricky with most applications is the domain. Certainly, it's faster to go learn a language than to learn a new domain. To that end, you can get the whole team trained faster in a language than you can hire someone with experience and train them to the domain.

You're kind of reinforcing the point though -- now you've got a whole team distracted by picking up a new language....why? how is it a good use of anyone's time? And it'll be a perennial training issue in the case of an esoteric language, because those team members will eventually turn over as well, meaning that you don't get to avoid either hiring or training a new person on it.

If it's just one component, implemented by a single dev, it really can make more sense to understand what it does and rewrite it in a language that's common in the company.

I'm not advocating NOT rewriting it. I'm just saying, back to the great grandparent's point, that the issue is a dev went rogue, NOT the language the rogue dev chose. The difficulty is the same regardless of the language the rogue dev chose; it's not that they picked Clojure, it's that they picked a language there was no organizational adoption of.

> Certainly, it's faster to go learn a language than to learn a new domain.

It's not only the language but the framework. For example I know javascript well enough but I now am quite a noob with Ember in my new role. I would say the framework is just as important as the language, at least when doing web development.

Yes. I've seen and contributed to dumpster fires in all of those languages. I would love to say it was all some rogue developer that crapped on things, but it is often just new developers. The more, the more damage.

It could have been Go and Java programmer trying to understand it. Or it could have been some clumsy tool written in node which Go programmer finds hard to read and understand. Clojure's main advantage is that you can you can learn it very very quickly up to the point when you understand most of the code, the language is very very small compared to "five main languages".

> Single engineers will pick clojure at companies , build a project in it, later that engineer will move on, now nobody can maintain this code so it’s rewritten in some normal language

"Normal language"?

You mean, whatever language is most popular at the company. What's "normal" at one would be completely alien at another. Even things like Java. If you don't have anything in the Java ecosystem, the oddball Java app will be alien and will likely get rewritten into something else.

The reason Clojure remains niche is that some people somehow think it's not a "normal" language, for whatever reason.

is it really hard to read (could be) or is it just that the average coder never saw lisp or sml and doesn't want to bother bearing the responsibility to learn something alien on duty ?

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